Some
people think social media is over hyped and not worth the time and
effort. Others say it is a fad and will go away and even more simply
don’t think they have the time to even consider what it is and should
they be using it.
Kevin Conway writes in a discussion group on the EMarketing Association Group within Linkedin a post titled, Social Media for Business Is Crap!. : Maybe
because my feeling for the hyped-up benefits of social media was
recently confirmed by a top millionaire online guru. If you follow the
most successful gurus his name is always at the top of the list. As a
matter of fact, he was the first online entrepreneur to make a MILLION
$$ in a day. That said, recently he published a PDF where he said “I think social media Su-ks”.
When I read that I felt a sigh of relief, “maybe I am not off
the tracks after all”. You see when you don’t “follow the pack” you
tend to sometimes feel like you are going down the wrong path or at
least missing an opportunity. Now, I must admit I use all the major
social media outlets including Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo, etc, etc.
However, not for direct marketing. And, even though I publish new
product releases on Twitter, analytics tells me no convertible traffic
comes from that source or Facebook. My primary use of social sites is
for building backlinks, but that is for SEO purposes. And, of course
the added exposure. i.e. “branding” doesn’t hurt.
Kevin’s post received over 2,000 responses on Linkedin and the majority of them agreed with his position. Remember
this is an EMarketing Association Group on Linkedin with over 150,000
members and most are marketers. The discussion thread went on long
enough that Kevin set up a new group on Linkedin titled after his post:
Social Media for Business is Crap.
I had the opportunity of exchanging communications with Kevin and
discovered that his purpose behind the original post was to get dialog
going about what works, why it works and what doesn’t work. The irony
is again that most of the response agreed that social media for
business is crap!.
Are Marketers Chasing Crap?
Regardless
of what you may think about social media the fact is that hundreds of
millions of people globally are using it for different purposes.
Marketers use it for their purposes and buyers use it for a different
purpose. While buyers continue to use it to “market” users wonder why
marketers don’t get the fact that their methods are being rejected. The reason for the rejection is that the message and the methods used is indeed a bunch of crap from the buyers perspective.
Buyers use social media to communicate, collaborate, find solutions,
serve those looking for solutions and help the community of users learn.
Sellers (marketers) use social media as an extension of mass
marketing methods aimed at catching a few and tricking them into a
transaction. This intention is in direct conflict with the
intentions of buyers. Buyers consider mass marketing as a trick of an
old trade and even if the trick gets the buyers attention the
subsequent experience is just another trick to capture buyer
information or steal their time.
Social media is a bunch of crap when sellers don’t match their intent with the buyers intentions. Get it?